2008 Woodie Awards
What a great review by Anatol Lieven in the latest LRB. It sounds every right note. It’s also very New American, but that’s another story.
Textbook example today:
We can easily imagine why this argumentative strategy might work. By suggesting that the war has come at the expense of vital domestic priorities, Byrd casts the invasion of Iraq as an unaffordable luxury. The beauty of this approach is that it could conceivably persuade the sort of person who tends to think that our efforts in Iraq are mostly benign. If we must choose between doing good abroad and taking care of each other at home, isn’t the choice obvious?
Even the most ardent antiwar activists should be wary of this logic. The crucial “choice” on which Byrd’s essay is premised does not really exist. Does the Senator actually expect us to believe that we can have either levees or foreign interventions — but never both? Are our resources so very limited that we must abdicate any active role in world affairs on the grounds that “our own people are so much in need”? Surely, there is something perverse about the pretense that our nation is too needy to remain active on a global stage.
This is so bad you almost wish they’d replace it with a sex column. To suggest that the Katrina efforts haven’t been hampered by our presence in Iraq is to ignore, well, um, what Republicans have to say. More broadly, America’s grand strategy is unsustainable, largely because we’re in a much weaker economic situation than most people believe, as Sherle Schwenninger pointed out a while back.
As a publication, The New Republic often nails the point that needs to be made about events and issues. But sometimes, they just don’t get it. Look at the magazine’s website today, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. This staff editorial on American exceptionalism after Katrina makes one of the most eloquent cases for big government that I’ve ever read- by rooting it in our fundamental desire for justice, which government can deliver. Then, there’s the stirring conclusion:
One of the most chilling things in New Orleans last week was the extent to which all of us were not represented in the crisis. The some of us who suffered were overwhelmingly poor and black. If you did not see race and class, you were blind. Barbara Bush saw race and class, and expressed race and class, when she visited the Houston Astrodome: “And so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. So this is working very well for them.” But the people living in the refugee camp on the Astroturf are not underprivileged, they are destitute. The good news is that most Americans did not respond like the overprivileged former first lady. Near and far, they saw race and class and they rushed to help–thereby shaming their government, which is one of the duties of civil society.
TNR also has a tendency to publish articles that miss the point- badly. This subscription-only Robert Satloff column is a prime example of that. It should be evident to anyone who has taken high school civics that democracy doesn’t work when political minorities- even ridiculously crazy ones- are denied basic rights. In America, we continue to protect the First Amendment rights of our original home-grown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Why? Because if we didn’t, we’d be letting the terrorists undermine our way of life.
Arab countries that curtail the basic rights of parts of their populations, even the elements preaching the most disgustingly offensive messages, are not democracies. It’s puzzling that Satloff doesn’t seem to understand that.
It is unfortunate that Asheesh and other progressives in his shoes must feel so restrained when discussing Israel. Their fear of arousing the ire of Jewish groups and progressive comrades-in-arms may help explain why Israel is such a frequent subject of articles in the traidtional media but so rarely appears as one in the liberal blogosphere. But the assumption by some Jewish organizations and individuals that criticism of Israel is somehow eqivalent to anti-Semitism is both ridiculous and harmful.
This does not mean that groups like AIPAC and the ADL are wrong to be wary. Centuries of virulent anti-Semitism (a problem that certainly continues today) combined with the lingering fear that the Holocaust might someday be repeated both legitimize the vigilance of these groups and explain why they may sometimes go too far.
Umlike many other progressive, my background as a Jew allows me to feel quite comfortable criticizing both Israel and the Palestinians for their actions (in case you were wondering about my Jewish credentials, I was bar mitzvah-ed, confirmed, and went to both Sunday school and Hebrew school for many years).
By virtue of my Jewishness, I will say both what I believe and what many progressives might want to say but can’t: The Israeli government has for years promoted settlements, both legally and illegally, in Palestinian areas. It is about time that the government did something about them. The religious fanatics among the Jews who refuse to leave the settlements are no better, in my eyes, than the fundamentalist Palestinians who they oppose. Both sides, and the various smaller factions that make up each, are to blame for the current situation. Each needs to do a better job of exercising restraint and exerting greater control over the radicals among them. I am not, to my knowledge, a self-hating Jew, so it seems to me that it might be difficult to construe my comments as somehow expressing a latent anti-Semitism.
I generally avoid writing about Israel-Palestine issues out of fear that I’ll alienate friends and make enemies. I’m also not terribly well-informed about the conflict, and have no special information about what’s happening on the ground. But it’s just impossible to avoid the subject at such a pivotal point as the implementation of Ariel Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan, scheduled to commence in a matter of hours.
In spite of my ignorance, I have done some reporting (see the August issue of The American Prospect) on how the withdrawal is impacting the policymaking community that watches the region from Washington, DC, looking specifically at how Sharon’s strongest advocates among the American neoconservative community are handling the move. I can tell you that the right has undergone a serious split between those who continue to pledge blind loyalty to Sharon, and their colleagues who feel betrayed by the Prime Minister and now side with the settlers against him. In many ways, the split among Washington elites reflects the political polarization in Israel.
Why does this matter? Everyone agrees that America has a huge stake in settling the conflict, along with enormous leverage in the peace process. For a very long time, forward-thinking, moderate voices on both sides of the debate here have been silenced by the shrillness of ultra-leftists and ultra-rightists, neither of whom have anybody’s interests but their own at heart. True, the ultra-leftists never really mattered, but the ultra-rightists undoubtedly dominated the discourse for years, making it almost impossible for those with fresh ideas to have a voice. Withdrawal has caused the latter to collapse into internal bickering. That gives progressives committed to security, justice, and stability for both sides, instead of revenge and partisanship, the chance to chart a course by which Israel and Palestine can peacefully coexist in alliance with the US.
Two weeks ago in the Periscope section of Newsweek, there was a story regarding the mistreatment of Qur’ans at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, ultimately dismissed the claim. He also blamed Newsweek for anti-American protests in the Middle East he said were sparked by the Newsweek story.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was quoted in a New York Times article as saying that the protests in his country killing 17 “was directed at the peace process that we have of inviting back the thousands of the Taliban to come back to their country. It was actually against the elections in Afghanistan. So we know what was going on there.”
Assuming that the Newsweek story is false (Newsweek retracted it this week), it is still shocking how little protest occurs both overseas and domestically regarding the treatment of “detainees.” The 600 plus prisoners have no legal representation and are being held indefinitely. Both an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report and a Department of Defense investigation have found signs of psychological abuse.
In addition, the ICRC has found instances of Qur’an abuse.
This raises the question: how many other things can the Bush administration pin on somebody else?
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